


Under The Skin

by shcherbatskayas



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Gen, Kidnapping, Meme Queen Natsumi Kuzuryuu but with less memes, Murder, POV Second Person, backstory headcanon, child murderer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 19:35:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9007813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shcherbatskayas/pseuds/shcherbatskayas
Summary: Once it’s all over and you walk out of that courtroom, trying to look 6’10 when you’re actually 3’1, a mob of reporters asks you if you regret what you’ve done. Your lawyer would normally advise you to say yes, of course you regret it, you regret it with your whole heart, but it’s all over now and you don’t have to hide anything anymore. 
 
“No way in hell. In fact, I’d do it again tomorrow.” You say, and you smile because you mean it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> NDRV3: Unreleased
> 
> Ryoma Hoshi's character and backstory: Mostly unestablished 
> 
> Fic: Out 
> 
> (If any of this ends up being close to right, I will scream for nine years straight. Enjoy!)

Your life starts going downhill one sunny afternoon when you’re eight years old, and even if it’s the beginning of the end, you consider it to be the best day of your life. There had been hard times recently, something about money owed and loud people and family security that you didn’t understand then and never cared to find out. It had all been kept away from you, locked up in some high place of your parents’ minds that you could never reach. All you knew was that the answer was with your mother’s brother, who they only called Kuzuryuu.

 

“All you have to do is be nice, Ryoma.” Your mother says, turning around in the front seat and taking your hands in hers, which is what she always does when she’s nervous about something. “His kids are your age. Just play with them and be nice.”

 

She’s all but begging you, which is confusing because you’ve _always_ been nice. Quiet, sure, but you’ve gone through your youth without any major issues or conflicts of any kind. You’ve also gone through it without any friends, but that’s besides the point. For her sake, you nod and say that you’ll be nice because you understand that this is very important for some reason.

 

The car approaches a large estate and you hold your breath. It looks like a castle, all large pillars and big windows and balconies that overlook a lake. The grass is surreally green and the sun is blinding. The breeze is cool and perfect and you can’t believe that your mother knows these people at all, let alone that they’re her family and by extension, _your_ family. Your family was well-off enough until a few weeks ago, but these people must be millionaires a hundred times over, these Kuzuryuus.

 

The iron gate is opened by two servants in identical black suits that must be hellishly hot. You thought the dress shirt and khakis was awful, but you’re surprised that they’re even managing to stand upright, let alone open that large gate as effortlessly as if they were tying their shoes. Your father mutters something you can’t hear that makes your mother laugh and you pout slightly, wanting to be in on the joke. You never get to find out what they say because the car stops right then, pulling into a garage. You hop out of the car and want to sprint out and explore everything, but one look at your mother’s tense face gets you to suppress that urge and you walk obediently between her and your father. 

 

The three of you approach the main mansion and when you look up at it, you see two figures in the window, peeking out at you. You can’t clearly see who they are, but they look your age and they both look excited. A different set of servants open the door for your family and lead the way. That’s when one of the figures from the window bursts into the hall. 

 

“Are you Auntie Kira?” The girl asks, and you stand in shock because she looks just like your mother if she was eight years old and not constantly anxious. She stands tall and proud, with blonde hair in a neat braid wearing a matching shirt and skirt that are both so white and bright that you worry it’ll outshine the sun. “And you, you’re my cousin, aren’t you?”

 

“I am.” Your mother says, smiling down at the girl. “And you must be Natsumi. Pleased to--”

 

“Why haven’t I seen you until now?” Natsumi demands, and you commit the name to memory. _Natsumi._ Natsumi puts her hands on her hips and looks down at you. You feel intimidated by this girl and her money and her grand presence. You think she must be some sort of royalty, and you want to prove yourself worthy, so you keep your face as neutral and blank as possible. 

 

“Well,” your mother begins, but that’s when the door at the very end of the hall opens to reveal what you assume is your uncle. He has to be, because he looks related to your mother. He doesn’t say a word, but your parents enter the room. You go to follow them, but your father turns around and shakes his head. You understand what that means and you stay put, trying not to sweat under the scrutinizing glance of Natsumi Kuzuryuu.

 

“What’s your name?” She asks, poking your cheeks. “And why are your eyes so big and weird-looking?”

 

“I’m Ryoma.” You say. “And I dunno. They just are.”

 

“Well, I heard that there are ways to make them look smaller.” She brags, obviously showing off her knowledge. “What you do is--”

 

“No!” A voice interrupts and there’s the second figure from the window, a boy who’s your age and your height. “You already did that to me and it looked like shit!”

You’ve never seen a kid your age swear and you’re horribly shocked, but you remember your father saying that these people are sharks, that they’ll pounce at the first sign of weakness, so you hide your surprise.

 

“That’s not true!” She whines, turning towards the boy who must be her brother because his eyes are green like hers and his hair is the same shade of blond and he even has the same rosy cheeks and bridge of freckles. He’s shorter than her by an inch and taller than you by a mile, but that’s never a surprise. “It looked positively _perfect_ , Peko said so.”

 

“Shut up!” He said irritably, tugging on his tie and pouting before turning his attention to you. “Hey, who’re you?”

 

“I’m Ryoma.” You say, and despite it all, you find yourself smiling because you’re in a castle of a house with kids your own age, kids who look at you and ask you who you are. “I think we’re cousins.”

 

“Hoshi?” He asks, and you nod in confirmation. “Well, welcome to the family, I guess. I’m Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu, and I’m gonna be the best yakuza boss in history.”

 

“And I’m Natsumi! And I’m already the best at everything so I don’t have to worry about it.” Your cousin lets out a musical laugh and Fuyuhiko hits her on the arm and soon enough they’re hitting each other and laughing and calling each other names. You stand there and decide to narrate the fight in your best sports reporter voice, which is hard because you’ve only ever heard them on the rare occasion that your father watches soccer.

 

“We should go outside.” Fuyuhiko decides, looking out the window.

 

“You just want to meet up with Peko during training.” Natsumi accuses, a cheerful shade of pink in her cheeks.

 

“Shut up! I don’t care about Peko!” He defends, and Natsumi snickers and leans down to your height.

 

“He _looooooooooves_ her.” She insists, which makes her brother get even more upset.

 

“No!” He says again.

 

“Then why do you want to go outside?” You ask, half teasing in a way that makes Natsumi double over in laughter. Your comment wasn’t particularly clever, but you think she just wanted an excuse to laugh.

 

“Because...Because I want to play tennis!” Fuyuhiko decides, and Natsumi recovers herself enough to straighten out her skirt and fix her hair and extend herself to her full height.

 

“Then let’s go!” She heads towards the door and you and Fuyuhiko follow. Once you get outside and the servants set up the net (how novel it is, how amazing that they have servants that set up nets for whenever they want to play tennis) and get rackets and a ball, Fuyuhiko asks the most important question of them all.

 

“Do you know how to play?” He asks, spinning the racket around in his hand almost like it’s a sword.

 

“I don’t.” You admit, feeling stupid that you haven’t figured it out.

 

“I’ll teach you.” Fuyuhiko says, and Natsumi hops up.

 

“And I’ll help!” She insists, grabbing her own racket. 

 

After that, nothing is the same.

 

***

 

By the end of the afternoon, you’re a better tennis player than either Kuzuryuu and you hit every ball thrown your way. You go to that house two more times that week and the second time, you meet Peko Pekoyama. If Natsumi and Fuyuhiko seemed to radiate light, she seemed to absorb it, with her solemn manners and black sailor suit and the sword strapped to her back. She is terrifying to you for the split second you see her alone, standing guard outside of the mansion gates, but as soon as Fuyuhiko arrives, her face twists into a gentle smile and you understand that so long as he likes you, you’re entirely safe from her wrath. You discover that she’s a good tennis player, but by the end of that afternoon, you’re better than her as well. 

 

And by the end of that afternoon, you’re officially yakuza, too. Your mother has been welcomed back into the family and all the debts you owed are paid off. Everything is fixed so long as your family goes to the Kuzuryuu mansion once a week, does whatever the eldest Kuzuryuu says, and you keep your mouth shut about it. At the time, you think it’s the biggest blessing you’ve ever received. You have no idea that it would eventually lead to death row. 

 

Every Sunday is spent in the gardens of the Kuzuryuu estate. The routine is simple. Your family arrives. Your parents go in and talk to your uncle, and while they do that, you play with your cousins. Tennis is first, but tennis then turns into Fuyuhiko and Natsumi throwing the ball at you from ridiculous heights and places and watching you hit it every time. Then Peko arrives, fresh from training and with a plate of some treat that she never eats. Sometimes you serve the ball at her and watch her slice it in half. After that, there’s tag and hide-and-seek and then the four of you just lay in the sun and do nothing but spot shapes in the cloud and talk about the future. Fuyuhiko says that he’ll be the mob boss, which you believe. He seems determined to marry Peko, who says something about it being improper but doesn’t seem to mind all that much. She’ll also be the best hitman in history. Natsumi says that she’ll run things behind the scene and be treated like a princess and marry someone handsome who’ll be more her assistant than her husband. When they asks you what you want, you shrug.

 

“I don’t really care.” You admit. “I just want to keep playing tennis with you guys.”

 

Natsumi takes that to mean that you’ll be a tennis star, and if that means you’ll keep getting the acceptance you crave and your family won’t ever be in debt again, you’ll be a tennis star. Her prediction seems to come true when the tennis unit comes up in gym class and you end up beating the teacher almost effortlessly. After that, your life is a cycle of school, tennis, and Kuzuryuus. The first is tiresome and annoying, but you love the second two with nothing less than your entire heart.

 

The routine is comfortable to you, until it’s not. You never cared about school when you were a child, but now you’re a teenager, now you’re in middle school, and the kids went from rude to downright cruel. You’ve seen yakuza hitmen that are nicer than some of your classmates. From what you gather, the Kuzuryuus have similar troubles, so you start copying their methods. You have none of the pretty, evil charm of Natsumi and you aren’t as loud as Fuyuhiko and your stature isn’t intimidating in the slightest, so you decide to go the typical rebel route. You add a leather jacket to your uniform. You smoke like a chimney. You find a weird beanie in a gift shop one day that makes it look like you have devil horns, and you start to wear it if only because it makes you look a little taller. You become meaner than all of them put together because it’s the only way someone like you can survive. 

 

It’s around that time that you start becoming famous in the tennis world. By all technicalities, you should suck at tennis. You’re obscenely short, your jacket constricts your movements, and you’ve never had a proper coach in your life. But you blow your competition out of the water every time, without fail. You travel to China, to the United States, to Brazil for the Olympics and then to Venezuela for yakuza business and then to Mexico for fun. You bring home more prize money than you can count. The kids at school look down at you until you buy a motorcycle with cash, laws be damned. An old tormentor of yours, a dumb kid who was only mean because he hung around kids who were, asks you to take him somewhere within the first week you have your bike. Perhaps a year or two ago, you would’ve said yes, but not now. Now you blow smoke in his face and laugh when he coughs. When you drive away, you imagine the smoke going through his pores and living under his skin, and it’s oddly satisfying.

 

***

 

One day, you get kidnapped. Another yakuza clan, you deduce through your blindfold. Money owed by the Kuzuryuus, you figure out as well. Even when they take the blindfold off of you, you keep your eyes squeezed shut. For the first time since you were eight, you remember what fear feels like, and you hate it.

 

You’re stuck in the basement of someone else’s mansion for a week. They beat you with every object they can, they starve you and make you piss in a bucket and squish you down so that you’re even shorter. Sometimes they rape you and laugh when you cry. You thought you knew what it meant to be tough, what it meant to be mean, but these men are something else. You hate them, you decide. 

 

Peko comes to your rescue once the money is paid. She doesn’t kill your captors due to politics, but she beats one of them with her shinai until you think he would be better off if she did kill him. You’ve never seen her mad before. You see the way she exhales once the job is done, like all the tension has left her body and she can finally relax, and you realize that there might be some satisfaction in hurting others. Later, as you sat and awaited your sentence, she would tell you that she was relieved because she hated killing and was glad it was over, not because it was fun to kill. Later, you realize that you misunderstood her hidden pacifism for satisfaction. But now, you just think it’s the best way to get revenge.

 

***

 

The next time you visit the Kuzuryuu house is the last time you ever will. It’s winter and the wind chills you down to your bones. Natsumi is just as bright as always, lazing about on the couch and showing you memes on her phone. Fuyuhiko talks at length about some business deal and he describes things in a way that only he can, in a way that always leaves you and Natsumi gasping for air between laughter. Peko embroiders something under the pretense that your aunt wanted something to hang in the front hall, but you watch her stitch every flower with the care and love of God and know that all of the years of training had yet to completely take away her girlish instincts and kind nature. 

 

You exchange Christmas gifts that day. Natsumi got you a pack of the finest Cuban cigars you’ve ever seen and Fuyuhiko got you a set of steel tennis balls. You bought Natsumi a purse that you saw while in Shanghai, a sparkling thing that seemed to be a source of light in itself. For Fuyuhiko, you got the largest bottle of non-alcoholic wine you can find (he has a borderline addiction to the stuff) and a set of many-sided die that he takes a strange amount of interest in. And even though Peko is supposedly just a tool, you get her a book that you were told was the greatest romance novel of the century.

 

Her gift to you is much more simple. She had no money to buy anything, has nothing to offer in terms of money, but what you get is more valuable than any physical thing. When she escorts you and your parents to the door at the end of the visit, you ask her the one question that’s been on your mind ever since you returned.

 

“If you were going to kill someone by hitting them in the head, where would you hit?” You ask her, and you watch her frown and put all of the pieces together. 

 

“Right there.” She says, pointing to a spot on the back of your head. “That’s where all of the vital life functions are. It would be quick and if you hit hard enough, it would be a guaranteed kill.”

 

“Thanks.” You say, and you give her the first genuine smile since you got kidnapped as you toss the steel tennis ball in the air. The next few days are going to be very fun.

 

***

 

The first one you kill is a low-level lackey of the organization. He has two kids. He works for that clan to pay off his debts. He watches soccer on the weekends and begs you to spare his life. His blood stains your jacket and he dies. Blunt force trauma to the head on Christmas Eve. 

 

The next ones are more fun. You kill lackeys as fast as they appear and start working your way up the organization. You don’t go to school anymore because it’s fun to kill in the daylight, when you can clearly see their blood and brains and the bits of bone. You kill and kill and kill and it’s the only thing that keeps you sane because otherwise, all you can think about is a dark basement and cuts on your face.

 

Your parents suggest taking you to a therapist one day. You laugh in their faces and that night is the night you finally finish that group off. You go to the mansion, you kill the guards, and then you kill the men who hurt you. You watch the steel bounce against their bones and you laugh like a maniac, you laugh long and hard and let down that facade of cool that you’ve kept up for your whole damn life. By the end of it, you’re sobbing as you throw the ball against the already-dead head of the clan leader. You only stop when you hear the sirens. You don’t even care to resist arrest.

 

***

 

You get a lawyer. You get a jail cell. You get thrown in with criminals whose crimes were simple things. Cocaine possession, soliciting, robbery, and arson are common in your block. You’re being charged 121 counts of murder, but you can finally sleep at night, so you consider it a fair trade. 

 

Your lawyer tries to spin every angle she can, trying to make you look sympathetic to the public eye, but you actively work against her. She asks you to talk about what happened when you were kidnapped and instead you told her about your lack of remorse. She tries to paint you as a troubled child prodigy and you talk about how you punched a member of the United States tennis team in the face because he called you a midget. She suggests saying that the Kuzuryuus caused you psychological damage, that Natsumi and Fuyuhiko and Peko put these ideas in your mind and that you were just following orders. That day, you almost get charged with 122 counts of murder because you throw your chair at her head and scream like a wild animal. It feels satisfying. After that, you don’t speak to her at all.

 

You spend most of your trial getting yelled at for smoking in court and staring down the jury. You’re unphasable, nothing the prosecution says to you or about you even makes you blink. You watch each side try to twist and turn you into something that will help their case. You refuse to budge.

 

The jury deliberation lasts under twenty minutes. You are found guilty on all counts. No one is surprised. 

 

***

 

Later, once it’s all over and you walk out of that courtroom, trying to look 6’10 when you’re actually 3’1, a mob of reporters asks you if you regret what you’ve done. Your lawyer would normally advise you to say yes, of course you regret it, you regret it with your whole heart, but it’s all over now and you don’t have to hide anything anymore and you never listened to her anyways. 

 

“No way in hell. In fact, I’d do it again tomorrow.” You say, and you smile because you mean it.

 

***

 

The sentencing takes a little longer, but you aren’t surprised by the result. Death row seems apppropriate, somehow. You almost feel guilty because you look back and see your mother sobbing and your father shaking his head, but not quite. The guilt doesn’t hit you until Natsumi rushes up to you, tears in her eyes, and slaps you across the face. Even then, it’s not guilt for what you’ve done but guilt for how it’s affected people who’ve been nothing but good to you. 

 

“Stupid!” She shrieks at you. “If you just told me, I could’ve--I would’ve---You wouldn’t--You were supposed to go to the Olympics, you asshole! You were supposed to marry a Korean pop star in Pyeongchang and become rich and have lots of kids and be happy! And now look at you! You’re going to death row!

 

“Come by the row sometime.” You request. “Play tennis with me.”

 

That line makes her dissolve into hopeless sobs and she stomps away, clutching onto her mother’s arm and saying things that you can’t quite make out.

 

Fuyuhiko is much less eloquent and long winded. “You’re the biggest fucking idiot I’ve ever known, Hoshi.”

 

“I know.”

 

“I mean, if you wanted them dead, I’d have fucking killed them myself. Nats and Peko and I...We would’ve helped you, dammit!”

 

“I know.”

 

“And yet you just _had_ to go lone wolf and be a big fuckin’ tough guy and all of that shit and now you’re gonna die in the electric chair.”

 

“I know.”

 

Fuyuhiko sighs loudly and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I still love you, you absolutely hopeless piece of shit.”

 

“You too.” You smile at him and he turns to leave. Peko looks at you and says nothing, but somehow you know what she means and it stings.

 

The guards lead you away to your cell after that and you never see any of them again. It’s for the best, really, at least that’s what you think. 

 

When the warden gives you the date and time of your execution, just a year from your sentencing, you laugh and shake your head because you know something he doesn’t know, and that’s the fact that you’ve been dead for quite a long time.


End file.
